How to clear the entire terminal (PowerShell)

Question

I had an issue. Using the clear or cls command in powershell clears only the visible portion of the terminal,I would like to know how to clear the entire terminal?

I use VSCode by the way.

Answer 1

To also clear the scrollback buffer, not just the visible portion of the terminal in Visual Studio Code's integrated terminal, use one of the following methods:

• Use the command palette:

  • Press Ctrl+Shift+P and type tclear to match the Terminal: Clear command and press Enter

• Use the integrated terminal's context menu:

  • Right-click in the terminal and select Clear from the context menu.
  • On Windows, you may have to enable the integrated terminal's context menu first, given that by default right-clicking pastes text from the clipboard:
    Open the settings (Ctrl+,) and change setting terminal.integrated.rightClickBehavior to either default or selectWord (the latter selects the word under the cursor before showing the context menu).

• Use a keybord shortcut from inside the integrated terminal:

  • On Windows, use Ctrl+K, the default.
  • As of VSCode 1.30.1, on macOS, a default exists, Cmd+K, but doesn't work, whereas on Linux there is no default at all.
    The solution in both cases is to define a custom key binding as follows, by directly editing file keybindings.json (command Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts File from the command palette):

{
  "key": "ctrl+k", // on macOS, alternatively use "cmd+k"
  "command": "workbench.action.terminal.clear",
  "when": "terminalFocus" // To avoid conflicts with Ctrl+K *chords* elsewhere
}

---

Using a command you can invoke from a shell in the integrated terminal:

Note: A truly cross-platform solution would require executing the VSCode-internal workbench.action.terminal.clear command from a shell, but I don't know how to do that / if it is possible at all - do tell us if you know.

• Linux (at least as observed on Ubuntu):

  • Use the standard clear utility (/usr/bin/clear), which also clears the scrollback buffer.

• macOS:

  • Print the following ANSI control sequence (unfortunately, the standard /usr/bin/clear utility clears only one screenful, not also the scrollback buffer): '\e[2J\e[3J\e[H' (\e represents the ESC char. (0x1b, 27); e.g., from bash: printf '\e[2J\e[3J\e[H'

  • You can easily wrap this call in a shell script for use from any shell: create a file named, say, cclear, in a directory listed in your system's PATH variable, then make it executable with chmod a+x; then save the following content to it:

    #!/bin/bash
    
    # Clears the terminal screen *and the scrollback buffer*.
    # (Needed only on macOS, where /usr/bin/clear doesn't do the latter.)
    
    printf '\e[2J\e[3J\e[H'
    

• Windows:

  • NO solution that I'm aware of: cmd.exe's internal cls command and PowerShell's internal Clear-Host command clear only one screenful in the integrated terminal (not also the scrollback buffer - even though they also do the latter in a regular console window and in Windows Terminal).